Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Brian Cox confused on more than global temperatures

(NOTE: I don't consider myself to be a climate change skeptic: the evidence points to between 40% and 70% of the last 200 years of global warming to be anthropogenic, caused by the burning of fossil fuels which put more CO2 into the atmosphere. However, this article is thought-provoking and, if true (even if only partly true), deserves to influence your opinion on the issue of global climate change.)

Celebrity physicist Brian Cox
misled the ABC TV Q&A audience on at least 3 points-of-fact on Monday
night. This is typical of the direction that much of science is taking. Richard
Horton, the current editor of the medical journal, The Lancet, recently stated
that, "The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific
literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

Firstly, Cox displayed an
out-of-date NASA chart of remodelled global temperatures as proof that we have
catastrophic climate change caused by industrial pollution. Another panellist
on the program, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, tried to raise the issue of
cause and effect: querying whether there really was a link between rising
temperature and carbon dioxide. This is generally accepted without question.
But interestingly - beyond experiments undertaken by a chemist over 100 years
ago - there is no real proof beyond unreliable computer simulation models.

Indeed, in 2006, John Nicol (a
former Dean of Science at James Cook University) wrote to Penny Whetton (then
meteorologist-in-charge of the climate science stream at CSIRO) asking if she
could provide him with copies notes, internal reports, references ("peer
reviewed" of course) which would provide details of the physics behind the
hypothesis of global warming. She wrote back immediately promising to find some
- which he thought was odd since he had assumed her office was
stacked-to-the-ceiling with such literature.

Whetton even went to the trouble of contacting other colleagues - one of whom
sent Nicol an inconsequential article in a Polish journal. After eighteen
months of their exchanging letters and all of her promises to be helpful, all
she could finally offer was the "scientific" section of "Climate
Change in Australia 2007". There, to Nicol's amazement he found nothing
apart from the oft quoted: "We believe that most of the increase in global
temperatures during the second half of the 20th century was very likely due to
increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide".

The chart Cox held up on Monday
night - now all-over-the-internet as proof of global warming - essentially
represents a remodelling of observed temperature measurements to confirm a
belief, that we most likely have catastrophic global warming.

The accurate UAH satellite record
shows a spike in temperatures in 1997-1998 associated with the El Nino back
then, followed by a long pause of about 17 years, before the recent spike at
the end of 2015-beginning of 2016. The recent spike was also caused by an El
Nino event. Global-temperatures have been plummeting since March, and are now
almost back to pause-levels. Indeed, Roberts was more correct than Cox, when he
claimed there had been no warming for about 21 years - despite the rise in
atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

The second misleading statement
from Cox on Monday night concerned the nature of the modern sceptic - often
harshly labelled a denier. Cox suggested that sceptics were the type of people
that would even deny the moon-landing. In making this claim he was no doubt
alluding to research, since discredited, funded by the Australian Research
Council, that attempted to draw a link between scepticism of anthropogenic
global warming and believing in conspiracies.

In fact, astronaut Harrison
Schmitt - who actually stood on the moon, drilled holes, collected moon rocks,
and has since returned to Earth - is a well-known sceptic of anthropogenic global
warming. In short, Astronaut Harrison knows the moon-landing was real, but does
not believe carbon dioxide plays a significant role in causing weather and
climate change. In fact, Schmitt has expressed the view - a very similar view
to Roberts - that the risks posed by climate change are overrated. Harrison has
even suggested that climate change is a tool for people who are trying to
increase the size of government - though he does not deny that he has been to
the moon and back.

Thirdly, Cox has qualifications
in particle physics, yet he incorrectly stated that Albert Einstein devised the
four-dimensional-space-time continuum. Those with a particular interest in the
history of relativity theory know that while Einstein reproduced the Lorenz
equations using a different philosophical interpretation, he was not the first
to put these equations into the context of the 4-dimensional continuum - that
was done by Hermann Minkowski. Minkowski reformulated in four dimensions the
then-recent theory of special relativity concluding that time and space should
be treated equally. This subsequently gave rise to the concept of events taking
place in a unified four-dimensional space-time continuum.

Then again, Cox may not care too
much for facts. He is not only a celebrity scientist, but also a rock star.
Just the other day I was watching a YouTube video of him playing keyboard as
the lead-singer of the band screamed, "We don't need a reason".

There was once a clear
distinction between science - that was about reason and evidence - and art that
could venture into the make-believe including through the re-interpretation of
facts. This line is increasingly blurred in climate science where data is now
routinely remodeled to make it more consistent with global warming theory.

For example, I'm currently
working on a 61-page expose of the situation at Rutherglen. Since November
1912, air temperatures have been measured at an agricultural research station
near Rutherglen in northern Victoria, Australia. The data is of high quality,
therefore, there is no scientific reason to apply adjustments in order to
calculate temperature trends and extremes. Mean annual temperatures oscillate
between 15.8°C and 13.4°C. The hottest years are 1914 and 2007; there is no
overall warming-trend. The hottest summer was in 1938-1939 when Victoria
experienced the Black Friday bushfire disaster. This 1938-39 summer was 3°C
hotter than the average-maximum summer temperature at Rutherglen for the entire
period: December 1912 to February 2016. Minimum annual temperatures also show
significant inter-annual variability.

In short, this temperature data,
like most of the temperature series from the 112 sites used to concoct the
historical temperature record by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology does not
accord with global warming theory.

So, adjustments are made by the
Australian Bureau of Meteorology to these temperature series before they are
incorporated into the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network -
Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT); and also the UK Met Office's HadCRUT
dataset, which informs IPCC deliberations.

The temperature spike in
1938-1939 is erroneously identified as a statistical error, and all
temperatures before 1938 adjusted down by 0.62°C. The most significant change
is to the temperature minima with all temperatures before 1974, and 1966,
adjusted-down by 0.61°C and 0.72°C, respectively. For the year 1913, there is a
1.3°C difference between the annual raw minimum value as measured at Rutherglen
and the remodelled value.

The net effect of the remodelling
is to create statistically significant warming of 0.7 °C in the ACORN-SAT mean
temperature series for Rutherglen, in general agreement with anthropogenic
global warming theory.

NASA applies a very similar
technique to the thousands of stations used to reproduce the chart that Cox
held-up on Monday night during the Q&A program. I discussed these change
back in 2014 with Gavin Schmidt, who oversees the production of these charts at
NASA. I was specifically complaining about how they remodel the data for
Amberley, a military base near where I live in Queensland.

Back in 2014, the un-adjusted
mean annual maximum temperatures for Amberley - since recordings were first
made in 1941 - show temperatures trending up from a low of about 25.5°Cin 1950
to a peak of almost 28.5°Cin 2002. The minimum temperature series for Amberley
showed cooling from about 1970. Of course this does not accord with
anthropogenic global warming theory. To quote Karl Braganza from the Bureau as
published by online magazine The Conversation, "Patterns of temperature
change that are uniquely associated with the enhanced greenhouse effect, and
which have been observed in the real world include... Greater warming in winter
compared with summer... Greater warming of night time temperatures than daytime
temperatures".

The Bureau has
"corrected" this inconvenient truth at Amberley by jumping-up the
minimum temperatures twice through the homogenization process: once around 1980
and then around 1996 to achieve a combined temperature increase of over 1.5°C.

This is obviously a very large
step-change, remembering that the entire temperature increase associated with
global warming over the 20th century is generally considered to be in the order
of 0.9°C.

According to various peer-reviewed
papers, and technical reports, homogenization as practiced in climate science
is a technique that enables non-climatic factors to be eliminated from
temperature series - by making various adjustments.

It is often done when there is a
site change (for example from a post office to an airport), or equipment change
(from a Glaisher Stand to a Stevenson screen). But at Amberley neither of these
criteria can be applied. The temperatures have been recorded at the same
well-maintained site within the perimeter of the air force base since 1941.
Through the homogenization process the Bureau have changed what was a cooling
trend in the minimum temperature of 1.0°Cper century, into a warming trend of
2.5°C per century.

Homogenization - the temperature
adjusting done by the Bureau - has not resulted in some small change to the
temperatures as measured at Amberley, but rather a change in the temperature
trend from one of cooling to dramatic warming as was done to the series for
Rutherglen.

NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies (GISS) based in New York also applies a jump-up to the Amberley
series in 1980, and makes other changes, so that the annual average temperature
for Amberley increases from 1941 to 2012 by about 2°C.

The new Director of GISS, Gavin
Schmidt, explained to me on Twitter back in 2014 that: "@jennmarohasy
There is an inhomogenity detected (~1980) and based on continuity w/nearby
stations it is corrected. #notrocketscience".

When I sought clarification
regarding what was meant by "nearby" stations I was provided with a
link to a list of 310 localities used by climate scientists at Berkeley when
homogenizing the Amberley data.

The inclusion of Berkeley
scientists was perhaps to make the point that all the key institutions working
on temperature series (the Australian Bureau, NASA, and also scientists at
Berkeley) appreciated the need to adjust-up the temperatures at Amberley. So,
rock star scientists can claim an absolute consensus?

But these 310 "nearby"
stations, they stretch to a radius of 974 kilometres and include Frederick Reef
in the Coral Sea, Quilpie post office and even Bourke post office. Considering
the un-adjusted data for the six nearest stations with long and continuous
records (old Brisbane aero, Cape Moreton Lighthouse, Gayndah post office,
Bundaberg post office, Miles post office and Yamba pilot station) the Bureau's
jump-up for Amberley creates an increase for the official temperature trend of
0.75°C per century.

Temperatures at old Brisbane
aero, the closest of these station, also shows a long-term cooling trend.
Indeed perhaps the cooling at Amberley is real. Why not consider this,
particularly in the absence of real physical evidence to the contrary? In the
Twitter conversation with Schmidt I suggested it was nonsense to use
temperature data from radically different climatic zones to homogenize
Amberley, and repeated my original question asking why it was necessary to
change the original temperature record in the first place. Schmidt replied,
"@jennmarohasy Your question is ill-posed. No-one changed the trend
directly. Instead procedures correct for a detected jump around ~1980."

If Twitter was around at the time
George Orwell was writing the dystopian fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four, I wonder
whether he might have borrowed some text from Schmidt's tweets, particularly
when words like, "procedures correct" refer to mathematical
algorithms reaching out to "nearby" locations that are across the
Coral Sea and beyond the Great Dividing Range to change what was a mild
cooling-trend, into dramatic warming, for an otherwise perfectly
politically-incorrect temperature series.

Horton, the somewhat
disillusioned editor of The Lancet, also stated recently that science is,
"Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid
exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an
obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has
taken a turn towards darkness." I would not go that far! I am not sure it
has taken a turn for darkness - perhaps just a turn towards the make-believe.
Much of climate science, in particular, is now underpinned with a postmodernist
epistemology - it is simply suspicious of reason and has an acute sensitivity
to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining particular
power-structures including through the homogenisation of historical temperature
data.